


In Umbra Luna Est

by leafiest_groves



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Angst and Feels, Daddy Issues, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Jason Grace Needs a Hug, Loss of Parent(s), Lupa POV, Lupa is a good mom, Mommy Issues, Mother-Son Relationship, Motherhood, Parent-Child Relationship, Parenthood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-11 22:46:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29000157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leafiest_groves/pseuds/leafiest_groves
Summary: In a world different, a world another, at a time before quests and wars and a young man could be lost to the world too soon, there was simply a mother protecting her child, as she-wolves are wont to do....Lupa has sent her children to their deaths. She has loved them and let go of them without thinking, simply because the Olympians required it of her. Just this once, she allows herself to be selfish. She can’t let them take her son.
Relationships: Jason Grace & Lupa
Comments: 4
Kudos: 15





	In Umbra Luna Est

**Author's Note:**

  * For [parker_kingofbees](https://archiveofourown.org/users/parker_kingofbees/gifts).



_”I have sent all of my children to slaughter, led them by the neck into violence. But I shall not send this one as well. You ceased to be his mother even in name once you entrusted him to me, Juno. You **cannot** have my son, you shall not have him too.”  
_

-

Lupa is afraid. She has always been afraid. 

Life is not easy for a predator, nor is it easy for prey.

At many times in her life, she has felt like both.

-  
  


Lupa feels the rush of the hunt in her when she is a predator, chasing prey to feed her children.

  
Lupa feels the trembling, shaking fear of prey in her when she sacrifices her children to whoever deems themselves in greatest need of them.

In the beginning there was pride, immense pride that the youngest of her pack should be strong enough to go to battle with demigods and deities and titans alike. 

Now, all of the pride and honour has faded. Lupa is exhausted.

How many soldiers has she raised, mindlessly? Simply because nobody else seeks to care for them? How many children has she come to love, each a little colder than the one before, only to abandon them to their “true” parents someday? 

A mother’s worst fear is burning her children’s shroud, burying their unfeeling flesh and bones in the earth, sinking their cold faces and unblinking eyes into the sea. 

Lupa has oftentimes been told that there wasn’t even enough of a corpse remaining to conduct rites for.

-

  
Broken by years of her pain, her cries and howls for hearts that no longer rouse themselves to sound, nay, that do not even beat, Lupa looks at the bundle before her in silence.   
  


A young child, barely 3 years old, is swaddled messily and lies in wait before her. Up until her presence is noticed, he sleeps peacefully. Lupa shifts out of her wolf form and into her human body. She sits crouched over the sleeping child, eyes darting from the soft skin to the chubby cheeks.

This isn’t a child who has known hunger or fear.   
  


“What is his name?” She asks.

Juno responds softly. “His name is Jason.”

Lupa trails a finger over the child’s mouth, seeing a scar that rips the corner with a pinkish jagged line. 

“Was he born with a cleft lip?” Lupa wonders aloud.

Juno shakes her head. “The child managed to escape the confines of crib...unsupervised as he was, there was a bit of an accident.”

Lupa’s eyebrows raise. He may not have been a child who knew fear, he was a child that knew neglect.

Suddenly, he wakes, and begins to fidget and cry. “Where’s momma?” 

Juno looks away guiltily, but Lupa looks him head on, even as Juno’s magic erases the image of Beryl from Jason’s mind, leaving his memories of her few and far between.

”I’m right here.” Lupa says softly, and Jason is not afraid of her.

She gets up and picks Jason up as she goes.   
  


Juno seems uneasy.   
  


_You’ll take him, won’t you?_

-

  
Lupa wakes to a little sigh. Jason is curled up to her in her wolf form, small hands buried in her fur as he subconsciously comforts himself in his sleep.

Nosing over her child, she is only slightly less concerned than she was the night before. He still shakes, trembling with the memories of his life before arriving here.

It is only natural, she supposes. 

Her ward opens his eyes and looks at her, and her wipes away the tears fiercely, even as they keep falling.   
  
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry-”

Lipa licks away the salty tracks on her child’s face, and she thinks perhaps she is more comforting as a wolf than as a human, warm and fluffy and doglike that she is.

_You needn’t apologise for your tears,_ she thinks quietly. _You are but a child. I want you to laugh, cry, scream and whine all while you still can._  
  
Her earlier assumption has changed. This is a child that knows fear. A child that knows to fear reprimands and anger for human emotion, a child that fears consequences for feelings he cannot control.

There are little glass objects in this forest, left behind by human beings. Whenever they shatter, Jason shakes and shivers. Lupa is sure then, of fear being instilled in this child. He fears shattering glass because it reminds him of how momma gets when she’s mad, when her big green bottles of glass are empty and she wants more impatiently.

Perhaps he can understand her, because soon after his first outburst, Jason cries more freely, more quietly and cathartically. “I had the worst dream.” He mumbles, face buried in her mottled grey and black fur. “I think Thalia’s- thals- she’s in trouble.”

Lupa can do nothing for his wayward sister. She comforts him still.

-

  
Lupa wonders sometimes how a day can pass like 10 minutes.   
  
“Is there something to eat?” Jason asks, quietly as usual.

Lupa feels the anxiety rising in her. The hunting wasn’t good in the past week, and she was altogether too caught up in her fight with Juno to remember that he needed cooked food.

Before Lupa can start saying something, Jason simply shrugs and slumps onto the ground. “It’s okay even if there isn’t. Momma didn’t give me breakfast either. Only Thalia did.”   
  
Lupa is increasingly tempted to find Beryl and burn her at the stake.

”Of course there is something to eat, silly child. It is simply not ready yet. You will have- what is it known as? Brunch? You shall be served brunch.”

Jason seems happier, perhaps even a little amused. “I though brunch was for big people.”

”I’m big, we can eat it together.”

This child knows hunger. This is a child who has missed meals and stuffed himself whenever the opportunity showed itself. A child that relies on another child to be a caretaker. A child whose stomach is used to emptiness. Lupa feels sick to her own.

When the roasted rabbit goes past Jason’s teeth with a flurry of laughs, Lupa is determined to keep the meat on his bones even in the dead of winter. That laugh is the sweetest thing Lupa has heard in decades. She has no intent to ever let it crack with bitterness of die off in terror.

-

He is barely 4 when he calls her mother for the first time.   
  
Perhaps it is the trauma or perhaps it is Juno’s magic, either way Jason seems determined to erase Beryl from his mind.

It’s a shy thing, a mumbled call for help with his shoes, but Lupa’s heart aches. It starts like this, with trust, and ends with a body she has no choice but to grieve over.

Soon the days give way to weeks and months, and following that first time, it seems Jason, like almost all children, has enough confidence to call for her in his own stubborn fashion. “Momma!” The obstinate pout makes many of his packmates watch in silent amusement. Lupa always answers.

”Momma!” He calls, before taking flight.

”Momma!” He calls, before calling a bolt of lightning to strike the mountain lion stalking near the den.

”Momma!” He calls, before starting a fire with the craze of childhood exploration, shocked to find that lightning can ignite trees.

Lupa has never had a child like this before. But she is so, so proud of him. Adores him guiltily. She cannot help it.

-

Jason is barely 7 when Beryl kills herself. Lupa sees fit to tell him. Jason’s lack of reaction would have been concerning, but it isn’t.

Jason is content to run like the wind he harnesses freely, to stalk and hunt alongside the pack that raised him. He is freer here, like a racehorse that escapes it’s life on the track for an open plain, and Lupa would never take it from him.

Lupa isn’t one to make allowances, but in Jason’s case, she most certainly is.

  
When Jason turns 8 she gives him the power to shift, and it truly feels as if it changes his life. Maybe he was dissatisfied with life as a demigod, maybe her dear child, in all his foresight, knew it would lead him to his death, and now that he has an alternative, he takes it freely, with open arms.

It’s almost as if he _refuses_ to go back to human form, for fear that it’s a route that will lead him to the lives of all the others he has seen that came and went from the Wolf House. Jason seems more and more afraid to leave with each passing day, asks if Lupa plans to ‘leave him behind’, and Lupa has no answer but to hold her child close and answer as any mother would, that she loved him too much to ever let him go.

He is young yet, but it seems like his mind won’t change on this one thing. As a human he wakes up in cold sweats still, shaking and burning with fear, with memories of Beryl and a supposedly dead sister that assault his imagination.   
  


Lupa watches in silence, as per usual. There is nothing she can do.

-

In the coming weeks she’s more tense than Jason is. She can sense that something is wrong. She knows and feels it, cannot shake the thought from her mind. Her suspicions are true, perhaps because they are a mother’s intuition.   
  


Juno comes to her, breaking the promise she made to Lupa the night she delivered Jason to her.

Lupa screams, begs and pleads, evens asks to fight.  
There will _be_ no fight, Juno says, clinically.

Jason won’t be able to shift anymore, nor will he have any memory of it. He’ll make a fine soldier, his instincts will be useful. He is of no concern to Lupa any longer. He is _no longer her son._

Lupa’s claws break out of her skin, leaving gashes and marks in the trees and the earth and she cries. Cries like her packmates do when they miscarry, when their pups are carried off by predators or die of illness. 

She seldom thinks like a human, but now she wails alone.   
  
She wants to refuse the truth that Juno and Jupiter have presented to her, all to no avail. Her son is _dead._ It isn’t what Juno says, but it is what Lupa hears.

-

He goes back to Juno, and Lupa watches in self-torture as her child forgets. His stepmother only leaves him with hazy memories of comfort from his time with her. Lupa watches as the power to shift is stolen from her son. Watches as his primary source of comfort vanishes.

He was right to be afraid. Lupa cries alone once more. _Her son is dead._

_-_

The news of the killing blow comes many years later. 

Lupa has been expecting it. Like a dog run to death by its master, his strength has finally give out. He cannot even bite back at the hands that begrudgingly feed him now, for they’ve disarmed him so much as to be toothless.

Lupa knows that. _Has_ known that for nearly a decade now.

Lupa doesn’t cry alone. This loss is one her whole pack understand and feel.

_Her son is dead._

Jupiter is cold, as always. His answer is one nobody wants to hear.

“Be grateful he’s being given a funeral at all.”

Lupa stands over the corpse of her child once the crowd of friends, admirers and enemies has emptied itself out.

She supposes Jupiter is right to tell her she must be grateful. She knows Caligula.   
  


Lupa is grateful that there is even a body left to bury.

**Author's Note:**

> For my beloved Parker, who I couldn’t write a birthday fic for in time because of horrid timing for laptop repairs and the date coincidentally falling in the beginning of Sankranthi.
> 
> Either way, they are one of the brightest stars that shine in my life, and they are someone I always want to remind of my love for them. This is for you, dear old sport, truest darling, you’re the nick to my gatsby, for my dreams are happiest when you are in them.


End file.
